Book of the Week: A stunning portrait of the NZ male species

2026-02-11 - 16:08

I started reading Breton Dukes’ Party Boy sitting on the toilet in our little rental in Ōtaki. With a one-year-old, the toilet is one of the only places I can be alone. Since having Plum, our beautiful baby girl, my largely idle existence as a freelance writer has been replaced with a very dry, very hetero, salaryman, day-to-day grind—waking to leave Ōtaki in the dark to catch the train to Wellington, coming home each night to a cooked meal, then sleeping alone on the toy mat in the living room, leaving the superking bed to Jo and Plum, for fear of accidentally smothering Plum in my sleep. Because of the angle of the louvres in the small window above my head, in the toilet where I read, I can often hear, with perfect clarity, the high-pitched screams of the neighbours’ five kids, bare feet thumping on the creaky wooden floors, interspersed with deeper, urgent voices of their parents. This ambience was appropriate for reading Party Boy: the story of Marco, 49, three kids, house-husband, with mild substance abuse issues, a tepid marriage, and a part-time job where he feels inadequate and old, and who must face his past, good and bad, to figure out who he is. Party Boy is a stunning portrait of the New Zealand male species, told with busy, claustrophobic intensity, as we follow Marco, who exists in a state of perpetual exhaustion, chasing after his three boys and trying to keep his head above water by macro-dosing Tramadol as he tries to plan for his upcoming 50th birthday. He is a refreshing character, because we already have no shortage of depictions of the rough-hewn exterior of the Stoic New Zealand male, but few of the sensitive little boy inside, and this book is an attempt to explore that disjunction between exterior and interior—what happens when your suit of armour doesn’t quite cover your paunch. Front and centre in the book is the long shadow cast by the ideological apparatus of the BHS: the Boys’ High School. Marco, like Dukes himself, went to Otago Boys (OBHS)– the same school my father attended. I went to a North Island iteration, New Plymouth Boys (NPBHS), where the motto was ‘et comitate, et virtute, et sapientia’ (comradeship, valour, and wisdom), and like Dukes, I have found memories from that time bubbling up into my consciousness and occasionally into my writing EditSign . While visiting my parents over Christmas, Jo, Plum and I walked through some of my old school grounds and I pointed out the ‘gay step’ (step on it and you’re gay), and the ‘gay tree’ (touch a leaf and you’re gay), and Meatball Alley where if you passed through it, the boarders would be obliged to give you a hiding. These locations that used to glow with the intensity of their signification were now just concrete, trees, and alleyways, and Jo and I laughed about how times have changed, but then, have they really, and then we talked about how things like that, things that used to seem peripheral and silly, might well have been the whole thing – just like dictum to keep your socks pulled up, hair above the collar, shirts tucked in – all those little disciplines that represent the importance of subordination. Marco was pretty successful at high school, with the ladies, on the rugby field—stiff-arming the competition—but when the book begins, he’s in a world inverted: the rugby boys are old and flabby, nerds are cool, rich, and shredded, sex is a privilege, and gender is a social construct. Marco’s wife Michelle barely acknowledges him, their communication seems to be mostly conducted by way of micro-aggressions. In one scene, Michelle enters as Marco showers in the morning, and, in a not-so-subtle act of domination, she shuts the window that he’s opened to release condensation. He points this out and she ignores him. Black mould is his problem. He does the cleaning (“crouched there by the toilet, wiping piss from between the bowl and the wall”). Poor Marco observes her from the shower cubicle, notices the strength in her legs, her shaved head, as he lathers soap onto his dick and balls. As she gets up to leave, she patronises him through the glass partition, tells him to smile, resonant of men catcalling women in the street. She slams the door on the way out and leaves Marco standing alone, Ken-like, behind glass, “crotch foaming”. Dukes is a very strong writer, most evident in the extended opening scene of the book: in the kitchen of a hip bar somewhere in Dunedin. Marco works alone, struggling to keep up with the orders for bar snacks which emerge like “long white tongues” from the squat printer beside the stove. Marco is older than all his co-workers by 30 years, but the owner of the bar, Jeff, is Marco’s contemporary. The subtle age/seniority dynamics are very cleverly depicted, and something I related to immediately: being a bit-too-old for a low-stakes job, working alongside teenagers who can’t quite figure out where you fit. I really admire the technical skill to write a scene like this one, with complex social dynamics seamlessly interwoven with very technical descriptions of cooking processes, right down to oiling up the rubber gloves to stop the cheese balls sticking to his fingers. The style of the prose is beautifully aligned with the way he sees the world. We hear that Marco’s dad would occasionally hug him: “Not say anything in particular, just sort of tackle him, hold him upright like it was a maul they were forming, a maul that then just turned into a big, long, silent hug.” I never played rugby beyond the barefoot grades, so I don’t know much about the bum-slapping, naked in the clubrooms, do anything for the boys, kind of closeness that the game offers to those who struggle with intimacy, but this book offers a little glimpse of it. Marco used to have friends at school, but now he isn’t so sure that was what they were. There are people around him now—his wife, his co-workers, his kids—but he’s lonely. He contemplates inviting his therapist to his birthday, the only person who really understands him, but he also worries about the therapist seeing all the different versions of himself he’s created. The book is narrated in the third person, but the voice is very close to Marco’s own. We never know more about what’s going on than Marco himself —and for most of the book, much less. Dukes’ decision to drip-feed plot details sometimes felt a bit synthetic, gratuitous. I was disappointed to discover that a number of tantalising breadcrumbs turned out to be red herrings. This might have been intentional, as a depiction of the way we perceive threats everywhere when we are anxious, but I spent a lot of the book holding onto what seemed to be crucial details that were largely ignored in the grand finale. Marco has found himself relegated to almost exclusively female-coded domains, and consequently finds himself underpaid, ignored, slightly degraded. We are supposed to feel a bit sorry for him and it’s hard not to at times, but I wonder if this misfortune only seems comic in tone because he’s supposed to be a man’s man. We discover that when he and Michelle met, he was in a particularly low point in his life, while she was on the rebound from a toxic relationship with a colleague, and Marco suspects that he might have played cuckhold to this other man. He wooed Michelle by being a good listener, making her gifts of food, elaborate deserts, jars of muesli, and loaves of bread wrapped in linen and tied with red ribbon, and she in turn rewarded him with flowers. Marco is no brute—he’s kind and thoughtful, he’s a good dad, a good cook – but we discover that during his time at OBHS he was part of an elite group of rugby boys called the FPP (at my school there was the GGC—the Genuine Good Cunts), and now, late into his life, he has begun to grapple with the culpability inherent in his membership, and his participation in whatever it was that happened back then. Party Boy captures the rather surreal and common experience of the gradual unwinding of all the knots and tangles that Boys’ school created—the pervasive homophobia, the learned abnegation of emotion, of affect, in favour of stoic silence, understated humour, and physical prowess. Undoing five years spent trimming oneself of all the excess of childhood flamboyance, to minimise parts of oneself, exaggerate others—only to discover, years after graduating, that some of the most masculine members of the 1st XV had been blowing each other in the changing rooms. Two years after I left NPBHS there was an investigation into a culture of bullying at the school, particularly in the hostel. In my last year at school there was the ‘loser of the year’, an annual tradition where a seventh former was selected to be stripped naked and towed in a cage trailer through the grounds of the girls’ high school. The target in our year was tipped off by a friend and managed to evade capture, despite many of the seventh form boys, including myself, driving all over the city looking for him. While a group of us were parked at the end of his driveway, I threw an egg at his house. I don’t recall feeling any particular guilt about any of this at the time. Accepted consensus amongst the seventh form boys was that the target boy’s personality had been significantly improved by the attempted capture. He had been seen as an egotistical blowhard before, and, unsurprisingly, after that day, tended to keep his head down. We hear a lot these days about how difficult life is for young men, the silent epidemic, male loneliness and incel recruitment, the Manosphere, while on the other hand, every other week there is another story about extreme family violence committed against women by entitled men unable to reconcile rejection (a sobering reminder came a few weeks ago when Clayton Weatherston appeared for parole). Dukes’ character is, for me, a clown, a comic foil, a compendium of silly masculine concerns, but he is also a symptom of a culture that produces horrific domestic violence statistics, so at times I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to see the lightness in his petty plight. There’s an allusive menace lurking beneath the surface in the book, evident from the first paragraph, as Marco prepares meatballs while “the dark sauce” simmers on the stove behind him, but the book fails to resolve this darkness. At times, Party Boy feels like a kind of dream, or hallucination, where, just like in the children’s game, Marco gropes about blindly in the dark, calling his own name in an attempt to evince some answer from the shadowy figurines that surround him. A few years ago, I accidentally attended a men’s support group at the community centre in the small town I was living in, asked along by a friend from a sports team I was a member of. Someone brought macaroni-cheese. Eight or nine men sat in a sharing circle, talking about their feelings. Most of the men were single, heavy, broad, strong, silent types, some subject to protection orders. As each man in the circle introduced himself, shared a little of his story, I felt a prickly feeling in my stomach, like I was in danger, an imposter. There is something terrifying about seeing grown men cry who aren’t meant to be seen crying. When my turn came, fearing they would see me as a phoney, I exaggerated some things from my divorce and managed to emulate a frog in my throat, for effect, but, just like at school, I don’t think they bought it. In the ‘support’ session that followed, we watched a brief presentation about anger management (a traffic-light system: red light means leave the room) and then the men and I brainstormed about solutions to recent conflicts with ex- and current partners. More than once, someone offering advice referred to women as ‘bitches’ or ‘slags’. There was no moderator. I finished reading Party Boy as I started, sitting on the toilet – Plum on the other side of the door, screaming as Jo tried to coax her into her little blue bathtub. There was no screaming coming from next door though. Maybe they’d put a TV on for some respite. As often happens, I heard the neighbour’s front door click open and shut, and their father’s footsteps creaking on the deck, down onto the front lawn where he has a golf tee set up with a net that is a little too close to our boundary fence, so the balls thunk into the wood, sometimes bouncing up and over, onto our lawn, where they sit like little white mushrooms in the long grass. As I turned over the last page, Plum had stopped her crying, and I could hear a gentle sploshing as Jo poured cups of water down her back. A dog barked somewhere far off, and I heard a group of schoolboys walk past, laughing – then silence, only punctuated by the electric thwack-thud, of the father next door letting off steam, hitting golf balls through the net and into our shared wooden fence. Party Boy by Breton Dukes (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $38) is available in bookstores nationwide. ReadingRoom is devoting all week to the author and his tough, challenging novel. Monday: a revealing interview with the author, conducted by Justin Agluba. Tuesday: a portrait of the author by his literary friend Victor Billot. Wednesday: an essay on Dunedin life by Talia Marshall, which the Archbishop of Canterbury praised on his X account. Saturday: a fantastic new short story by Breton Dukes about a bad scene on a family holiday on the Sunshine Coast.